The Truest Beatles Biography Yet

Tune In is huge, detailed, and worth every page

Even if you're a casual fan of The Beatles, you probably have at least one book about the band on your shelf. Whether it's a coffee-table affair featuring photographs of the recording session for "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," an analysis of the making and significance of Revolver, a memoir of an intimate (or not-so-intimate) of the band, or a listing of every bootleg recording known to circulate, there are literally thousands of books on The Beatles dealing with every niche imaginable. And yet, there are barely a handful of serious biographies about the band, and until now, there have been frankly no good ones.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Author and historian Mark Lewisohn was probably the perfect person to change that. His massive but engaging biography of the boys from Liverpool, Tune In: The Beatles: All These Years, is the first in a promised trilogy and took ten years to complete. Lewisohn began his scholarship on The Beatles thirty years ago with a chronicle of the band's BBC appearances for the now-defunt Beatles Monthly magazine, and followed that up with day-by-day chronicles of live shows and recording sessions, often with the help of The Beatles' inner circle and sometimes even The Beatles themselves, which became the gold standard among the legion of Beatle obsessives. When it was announced in 2005 that he would be tackling a biography of the band, there was a collective sigh of relief in fandom that finally someone would get the story right. Lewisohn hasn't let those fans down. Over the 944 pages of this first volume, his no-nonsense, just-the-facts approach is a service to The Beatles' legacy in the truest sense of the term.

The length, and the fact that the book ends in 1962, with the band on the brink of stardom, may put off some readers. And in fact The Beatles aren't even The Beatles for most of the book. Instead they are just working-class kids from a dingy Northern England town, bit by the bug of American rock 'n' roll and trying to break free of the small and depressing future before them. But the rewards of this book are great. Lewisohn treats his subjects seriously, as historical, if ultimately remarkable, figures, and eschews the myriad myths that have grown up around the band in favor of the sorts of details and minutiae, wrapped in a serious but breezy narrative, that give us the fullest picture of who John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and, eventually, Ringo Starr were.

Like their contemporary John Kennedy — whose assassination and its impact may have indeed been the catalyst for the breakthrough stardom The Beatles found here in America — the band's history is marked with constant what-ifs. Suppose John Lennon's mother (or his Uncle George, who helped raise him; or his friend, the band's early bassist, Stuart Sutcliffe, for that matter) hadn't died, making him the archetypical angry young man? Or that he didn't meet Paul McCartney, who was as unique as Lennon in that he was already an accomplished musician and budding songwriter when there probably wasn't another person their age writing songs in Liverpool at that time? Suppose Brian Epstein hadn't been so tenacious in his pursuit of the band, or so lonely and damaged that he needed to be? Or that George Martin hadn't been practically forced to sign The Beatles and then subsequently fallen in love with their spirit and wit? While there may not be any seemingly huge revelations here (original drummer Pete Best simply didn't fit in), these tantalizing questions keep you turning the pages. But really, tracking the day-to-day trajectory toward The Beatles' breakthrough via Lewisohn's detailed account, free from the legends we grew up with, is an astonishing tale in itself.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Plus, we're probably closer to answering the age-old question: Who was greater, The Beatles or The Rolling Stones? No matter who you may love more, or what Keith Richards may argue, The Rolling Stones will likely never be afforded the treatment their friends and rivals The Beatles get in this wonderful exploration of the formative years of these four men who truly did shake the world. That's because if there's one thing we learn from Tune In, it's that even in the beginning, there were The Beatles, and then there was everyone else.

A Part of Hearst Digital Media
Esquire participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.